Most vendors focus on selling discrete products to address specific IT needs and challenges. When these needs and challenges become more complex, multiple products are often required, each with its own price tag that adds up quickly. Citrix on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach, offering comprehensive solutions comprised of leading-edge technologies that together, help organizations overcome the most complex challenges facing today’s IT environments and achieve the highest levels of productivity at far lower cost than competitors’ products. One great example is Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops powered by Citrix Hypervisor.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a feature-rich virtualization solution that enables organizations to build, provision (securely and on-demand), and maintain applications and desktops for its users, regardless of their location, the devices they use (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone), or the network to which they’re connected. The solution includes tightly integrated technologies that optimize application and desktop performance, availability, and reliability.

Whether a customer chooses to implement Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on-premises, in the cloud, or through a combination of the two (hybrid cloud), powering the solution with Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) enables them to maximize benefits (reduced application and OS image management and maintenance) at a fraction of the cost of competing vendors’ products.

How exactly do customers maximize the benefits of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?

By taking advantage of the features unique to Citrix Hypervisor, (i.e., PVS-Accelerator, Hypervisor Introspection, live vGPU-enabled VM migration, and more), organizations can optimize application and desktop performance, scale, availability, and protection, without the additional virtual infrastructure cost typically incurred with other virtualization platforms. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers are entitled to Citrix Hypervisor (and its entire feature set) at no additional charge.

High Productivity Levels, Reduced Virtual-Infrastructure Costs

It’s quite simple really: by implementing a unified, comprehensive solution instead of a number of individual products that have to be put together like pieces of a puzzle, Citrix customers achieve the highest levels of user productivity while realizing dramatic reductions in virtual-infrastructure costs.

In addition to the capabilities noted above, the latest platform release, Citrix Hypervisor 8.0, offers the following new features that customers are leveraging in their virtual app and desktop environments:

  • Virtual disks larger than 2TB to support ever-growing workloads (i.e., large databases, big data analytics, etc.)
  • Disk and memory snapshots for vGPU-enabled virtual machines
  • UEFI boot for Windows OS guests (experimental)
  • New guest OSes, including (but not limited to) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop 15, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.16, CentOS 7.6, and Microsoft Windows Server 2019

As an enterprise-class hypervisor capable of supporting the most critical workloads (both on-premises and in the cloud), Citrix Hypervisor is purpose-built to bring out the very best of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. This means offering features such as:

  • Live migration of vGPU-enabled VMs: minimizes downtime for business-critical, graphics-intensive workloads during maintenance windows
  • Zero-downtime live patching: Avoids downtime during host system patching
  • Thin provisioning: allows storage resources to be increased dynamically as virtual disk storage (Storage Repositories) capacity demands increase
  • Networking SR-IOV: enables PCIe device-sharing and device capacity extension; reduces hardware costs and improves system I/O performance
  • Tablet mode enablement (Windows Continuum): provides the ability for virtual desktops to automatically and seamlessly adjust their interface to Windows 10s tablet mode and back

Learn More About Citrix Virtualization Solutions

Together, Citrix Hypervisor 8.0 and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provide a complete virtualization solution that delivers optimal application and desktop performance, scale, availability, and protection at a cost FAR less than competing products. Read about Citrix Hypervisor 8.0 and how it’s helping organizations of all sizes get the most out of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. For technical information about Citrix Hypervisor 8.0, check out the product documentation page.

Until next time,
Andy
Citrix Hypervisor PM